simont | (no subject)

Well, things aren't as bad as they seemed.

Pizza Express have turned out to be astonishingly clued up about gluten-free diets. (I hadn't expected a pizza-and-pasta shop to need to know about it at all: I'd assumed that coeliacs wouldn't be so silly as to set foot in the place. I only gave it a try because Owen googled up a blog entry by another coeliac who'd tried it and had a good experience.) They don't actually stock GF pizza bases, but they're quite happy to use one if I bring it along, and they were able to look over the starters menu with me and tell me what I could eat. (And in particular they left off one of the things that looked from the description as if it could reasonably have been safe, which somehow gives me confidence that they're not just guessing.) They even have a GF dessert on the menu – lemon polenta cake – which is really rather nice.

So I went to Monday geek pizza after all yesterday, and will probably continue going back. The only snag is that the GF pizza bases I'm currently buying from Sainsburys are rather small; as a matter of moderate urgency I need to find some bigger ones.

This was also an interesting experiment because it narrowed down the cause of my home-made pizzas lacking cohesion. When I make pizza from a base and some toppings, they never seem to stick together properly, and the toppings slide off all the time when I'm eating the result. It wasn't clear to me whether this was the fault of the base or of my preparation. I can now confidently state that it's the latter, since Pizza Express managed to make toppings stick properly to the same base that I failed to last week. I wonder how it's done.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I suppose there are three possible conclusions we can draw

a) I can cook far better than your mother.
b) I have a lower expectation for Pizza bases.
c) I, by accident, found an ideal Pizza recipe.

I doubt a) or c) are likely hence we are left with b). One thing that might suggest the bases aren't too bad is that I make them with my automated bread maker (rather I make the dough and then roll it out myself) so it is more sorft and bread-like than one that one might make by hand.

WRT the keeping problem, they can quite easily be wrapped in cling=film and frozen. Then the problem reduces to remembering to take it out of the freezer in the morning.

Rich, why don't you try getting some gluten-free flour (+ whatever else is needed to replace normal flour) and seeing what happens to the recipe? It'd be an interesting experiment.

True, the other possibility is to create not-quite-pizza-bases. For example we often use Naan breads or french-sticks as bases which work nicely. Perhaps there exists some GF product which could be co-opted into being a base.